The rationale is also explained in the policy:

Ubuntu is a trusted open source platform. To maintain that trust we need to manage the use of Ubuntu and the components within it very carefully. This way, when people use Ubuntu, or anything bearing the Ubuntu brand, they can be assured that it will meet the standards they expect.

I'm not sure how they achieve the goal of maintaining trust by simply charging a licencing fee for the brand. Unless they review and certify every modified build, this seems like a simple dual licencing model under the veil of making sure customers aren't misled.

It does sound like Ubuntu reviews and certifies the build. I know they do so when Ubuntu is modified for distribution on a computer. So why wouldn't they in this case.

I don't think it's fair to describe it as a veil either. Preventing customers from being misled is the entire point of trademarks. Someone in another thread used Cocacola as an example.. so imagine if someone took Cocacola, added some ingredients, and started selling it as Cocacola... that's pretty clearly trademark infringement. And that's exactly what they're doing here.

I have to wonder why they even modify it.. Ubuntu has great hardware support in my experience.. and they release cloud and server images exactly for this purpose. Completely free.

Like when ice and a slice of lemon is added to Coca-Cola in a glass? So technically Coca-Cola is just ignoring that?

If Coca-Cola's recipe were given away for free, with the explicit requirement that users who modified the recipe, then sold the product as Coca-Cola pay a fee, then yes... But in general no, not like "when ice and lemon is added to Coca-Cola."

This doesn't seem to match up with what one of the commenters said about Dreamhost: https://twitter.com/cleverdevil/status/744622945096503297

If you log into one of their shared hosts you'll see custom kernel, custom packages, etc.

Given the price, I'd say this is more about entering a commercial agreement. Once they do that they can have influence on the custom version. To use that influence will, no doubt, cost money.

The rationale is also BS unless "trust" costs just 1-2euro.

Their modifications to Ubuntu have caused me problems in the past, so I'm not really sympathetic.

Ran into this problem a couple of months ago.

Could not figure out why Docker would not install on a stock 14.04 bare metal server from OVH.

Turns out it was their custom kernel.

With a little flag in the corner giving the option to install the stock kernel. Trying to do that gave no end of problems. So reverted to the stock Proxmox, and ran my 14.04 in a VM that uses pretty much all the resources.

True, it cost me a small %age in overhead, but it was the easiest/quickest fix.

I needed OVH hardware specifically, so I ended up installing a stock kernel and figuring out how to edit the GRUB.

Why did I want dedi hardware? because: http://bitemyapp.com/posts/2016-03-28-speeding-up-builds.htm...

Mozilla has something similar, at least when it comes to Firefox.

Looks like everyone took their pitchforks out too soon.

Yeah i wonder how much this relates to a certain packaging format PR war that is going on right now...

How about all upstream authors demanding fees from Ubuntu? Ubuntu modifies upstream packages quite ruthlessly, often to the detriment of the users.

I'm no expert, but I assume there is no license agreement saying you must pay a fee to distribute modified versions of these upstream packages.

Not sure about trademarks, but at least in copyright, the lack of a license doesn't mean you are free to use something; on the contrary, if there's no license, you can't use it at all.

"no license agreement saying ..." does not imply "no license agreement".

Fair enough. Are there licenses agreements covering these packages?

You are conflating copyright with trademarks.

How so? Ubuntu uses the names of those programs in their packages, no?

As far as I am aware Ubuntu complies with all trademark requirements for upstream software that it packages (e.g. Firefox, and probably other 3rd party pre compiled software). For most F/OSS software they have no trademark requirements and/or registered trademarks. So in effect Ubuntu are doing the right thing (tm).

Sigh. Why is everyone so literal here. The question then is: If upstream authors are so generous not to trademark their works, and Ubuntu (attempts) to make money on their backs, why does Ubuntu not do the same for its derivative work?

OVH should call it OVH Linux, similar to Amazon's AMI (not Ubuntu based). With no association to the Ubuntu trademark they should be spared with the need to recompile from sources.

Ubuntu trademarks would still remain in package names, changelogs etc., so a full recompilation is still required

This makes it sound easier than it really is. It's not just recompilation, it's patching everything to remove the trademark. Then you have tens (hundreds?) of custom packages to build and most of all to test and maintain.

I don't think they change the kernel to support any hardware, they change it to keep using the same base image for their virtualization host.

Probably using OpenVZ virtualization software which forces them to have the same kernel in host and guests.

> If that's true, they shouldn't be surprised Ubuntu wants a license fee

How much to they pay Debian for using a modified version of Debian?

IDK.. but Ubuntu doesn't call their product Debian. They call it Ubuntu.

If OVH wants to take Ubuntu and call it OVH Linux, they can do that.. and they won't need to pay Ubuntu anything.

OVH is being asked to pay for a license because they refuse to rename it, and they refuse to distribute it unmodified.

OVH could also distribute it unmodified, and then package their changes into a deb package that they tell customers to install. Or they could simply allocate severs depending on which OS a person selects (so Ubuntu will work unmodified).

The fact is, they have several options to comply with Ubuntu's trademark policies.. but they've chosen to do none of those things.

You sure it's just how they call it? IANAL but I believe they would also have to remove "ubuntu" from any user noticeable string.

Classic OVH.

Note that you can't take some subset of Debian, add some modifications, and call the result Debian. In general you can't pay for that privilege either - either it's Debian - Free and open source, or it's something else, that's derived from Debian. There has been some recent discussions on the cloud-devel list about this, for what can be labelled as a "Debian" cloud/vm-image (eg: Amazon AMI etc). Eg:

"Re: Debian images on Microsoft Azure cloud" https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/11/msg00099.html

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and I'm not affiliated with Debian (other than being a long-time user).

See also:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud

and more generally:

https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/Trademark

[ed: As for the "upcomming policy" mentioned in the email linked, I think this is still an ongoing process, but it more or less boils down to the wiki-pages linked. IIRC one of the issues with the initial Azure effort was that the scripts generating the images needed to run on Azure - so couldn't readily be re-created by just anyone.]

The license fee is for the Ubuntu name, not the software. They are free to modify it but call it something else just like Ubuntu is a modified version of Debian.

Canonical is certainly trying to find a way to monetize it's OS too. It must be frustrating to be the N1 guest OS and make no money out of it. They have a couple of commercial offerings but for most part companies just use Ubuntu VMs and never pay for the security updates, bandwidth, ...

> Canonical is certainly trying to find a way to monetize it's OS too.

My bet it's the trust/'brand' thing rather than monetization - allowing anyone to make 3rd party modifications to your product and passing it off as the original/pristine version is a bad idea in any market. Heck - even Mozilla ran into this with Debian when Debian was maintaining and applying their own parallel patchset on top of Firefox. Debian snarkily called their version 'IceWeasel'[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_software_rebranded_by_...

There was no snark - just a need to come up with a set of different names for Mozilla software modified as necessary by Debian.

I think the 'weasel' bit was pure underhanded snark (in a You're no foxes- you're a bunch of weasels kinda way). The original proposal within Debian was "IceRabbit"